The decision to attack al-Qaeda along with ISIS at the start of the war is looking like a serious blunder, as al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front turned on US-armed “moderate” factions, and has routed them almost entirely out of the north.

The Hazm Movement, one of the bigger CIA-armed rebel factions, officially dissolved this past week after losing the last of their bases to Nusra in Aleppo Province.

Though the US still has some allies along the Jordan border, these too are entirely at the mercy of al-Qaeda, and would likely be wiped out quickly if Nusra turned on them as well.

Having made an enemy of ISIS, Nusra, and the Assad Government, the US is essentially at war with all meaningful factions, while the smaller groups, to the extent they even still exist, continue to tear each other apart.

That leaves the Pentagon hoping to create a new “ally” in a year or two, and other officials openly talking about trying to spin al-Qaeda as a relatively moderate faction just so they have somebody meaningful to arm.

Neither seems likely to work, and so the US war in Syria is likely to just mean intermittent airstrikes to benefit Kurdish factions that the US can’t officially deal with because they’re listed as terrorist organizations, and no progress anywhere.

Author: Jason Ditz

Empire USA needs expansion to survive, a thing that can only be achieved by winning battles in war. Which is why most of the mercenary forces employed by our Empire are called Terrorists, creating the illusion that they are enemies when really their comrades in arms.

Alan MacDonald

Jason, I wrote this same comment to Bill Van Auken (WSWS) regarding his similar article on the same insane US Empire war strategy:

Yours is an excellent article on the seeming insanity of the US imperialist (qua EMPIRE) war policy in the Middle East and beyond.

I continue to be disappointed and confused as to why no honest media sources, like WSWS and Antiwar, do not explain to the American (and global) working-classes that Thomas Barnett's 2004 Naval War College strategy and book, "The Pentagon's New Map" (which could have more honestly been titled, "The Global Empire's New Map") lays out this entire imperialist criminal war plan throughout the whole Middle East across the 5000 mile swath from Mauritania to very boarders of China and Russia (as is now obvious in Ukraine) to capture, control, and "Occupy" all of these 'GAP' countries in the 'crescent of instability' — as part of this Disguised Global Capitalist Empire's ultimate scheme illegally employing our former country's soft and hard powers.

This Empire controlling our former country must be diagnosed, exposed, and excised like the cancer that it is:

"The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, “U.S.” imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend, and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less to a “U.S.” imperialism per se than to a global capitalist imperialism. We face an EMPIRE of global capital, headquartered, for evident historical reasons, in Washington." [caps added]